In order to deal with the shortening of the business cycle and sudden changes in the business environment in recent years, computer systems capable of accommodating such changes flexibly and rapidly are sought. In order to meet such demand, a system architecture referred to as (SOA) Service-Oriented Architecture has been proposed.
With SOA, the functions of an existing system are made public as software components and are made to cooperate with one another to thereby construct an overall system by “combination”. Communication among the software components is implemented by a Web service accessible by SOAP, by way of example.
Furthermore, in a case where the functions of existing systems having difference authentication domains are utilized and an overall system is implemented by “combination”, authentication becomes necessary whenever a function is utilized. Accordingly, a method referred to as SSO (Single Sign-On) in which functions across domains become utilizable merely by the user being authenticated a single time has been considered. A method of managing credentials between different authentication domains by a key chain is available as a conventional technique for implementing SSO (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2008-071226). Further, there is a method using so-called “federation” in which different authentication mechanisms establish a relationship of trust to thereby enable an exchange of data by using the same credentials. There is also a method based upon operation using the same user name and password by synchronization between different authentication mechanisms (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-110364).
Although the prior art described above makes it possible to readily acquire data and to set data between different authentication domains by SSO-based authentication, it is difficult to maintain continuity at the content level of the data. In order to link systems across different authentication domains, however, it is desired that continuity be maintained at the content level.